TRIPOLI —
Libya's parliament has urged Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni to form a new government within a week, an assembly spokesman said on Tuesday, apparently rejecting a cabinet request for more powers to tackle the disorder crippling the OPEC country.

A weak central government in Tripoli is locked in confrontation with parliament and unable to control militias that helped oust Muammar Gadhafi in a 2011 uprising but kept their guns and carved out autonomous fiefs.

“The General National Congress has appointed Abdullah al-Thinni as the prime minister under a condition of forming a government within a week,” parliamentary spokesman Omar Hmeidan told Reuters.

Once a Cabinet had been formed, the congress would decide whether Thinni and his minister could stay until a general election expected for later this year, he said.

Thinni's had earlier written to parliament asking for more powers and a longer mandate but denied media reports that it had resigned at a time of deepening turmoil that has hit the North African state's lifeblood oil exports.

In a typical sign of chaos and often contradictory information in Libya, the state news agency LANA as well as Libyan and Arab television stations said the Cabinet had quit.